Funny Valentine launched an attack.
Johnny and Gyro did the same.
Steel balls and nail bullets fired together, once again tearing open the light wall and striking the charging Funny Valentine.
Bang!
Half of his body aged rapidly, while the other half was covered in deep cutting wounds.
Johnny was gradually mastering the Spin of the Cavalry as well!
After a half-second pause, Funny Valentine's body suddenly exploded.
'Dead?!'
Joy surged in the hearts of Johnny, Gyro, and Hot Pants.
But Ryosuke knew, it wasn't that simple.
Splash!
The sound of water rose beside them.
Two Funny Valentines burst out of the seawater, pouncing left and right toward Johnny and Gyro.
The narrow path they were on was forcibly created by using the power of the saint's remains to split the ocean. It was extremely cramped, with almost no room to dodge.
The two duplicates pulled out guns from their coats and aimed at Johnny and Gyro.
From the earlier steel balls, Valentine had judged that Ryosuke had not yet mastered that extremely strange rotational power. He intended to eliminate Johnny and Gyro, the two greatest threats.
Johnny raised his hand, aimed at the opponent's gun, and fired a nail bullet.
"No! Johnny! Don't shoot the gun, shoot the person!"
Ryosuke's shout came from behind.
He saw it clearly. These were the three duplicates Valentine had summoned earlier when attacking Hot Pants, the ones that had been knocked into the sea by her tail.
Obviously, the Valentine who had just been killed by the steel ball and nail bullet had, at the very last moment before being hit, transferred D4C's authority elsewhere. So the one that died was only a duplicate.
In other words, among the three duplicates that fell into the sea earlier, one had become the real body.
With firearm technology from the 1890s, a revolver that had been submerged in seawater for a long time was very unlikely to still be able to fire. Combined with the real body still not appearing,
Ryosuke guessed Funny Valentine's plan.
"He's using two duplicates to 'sandwich' you!"
As he spoke, two steel balls shot out, about to knock Valentine's two duplicates away.
But the path was simply too narrow.
Johnny's nail bullet pierced through one duplicate's throat. Gyro's steel ball smashed another duplicate's head apart. But in such a confined space, the two corpses inevitably slammed into Johnny and Gyro... Completing the "sandwich."
"Goodbye."
Funny Valentine emerged from the seawater, returned to the light wall, and snapped his fingers.
Johnny and Gyro, along with their horses, vanished together.
Only two dead Valentine duplicates remained, falling to the ground with two dull thuds.
———
[Parallel World]
As soon as Gyro and Johnny arrived, they heard dense gunfire.
The Funny Valentine of this parallel world had been waiting for a long time. Seeing the two appear, he pulled the trigger without hesitation, bullets flying toward them.
At such point-blank range, whatever Steel Ball Breaker or Golden Spin, it all lost its effect. The two could only watch helplessly as the bullets whistled toward them.
"Hiss!"
Just as the bullets were about to pierce them, the horses beneath them reared up together, using their bodies to shield their masters.
Bullets tore into the horses' chests and bellies, bursts of blood spraying out.
———
[Base World]
Johnny and Gyro were gone.
Only Ryosuke and Hot Pants remained.
Their gazes turned together toward the road ahead.
Funny Valentine, holding Lucy in his arms, stood within the light wall.
To Johnny and Gyro, the light wall was nothing more than a thin sheet of paper.
But to Ryosuke, who had not yet mastered the Spin of the Cavalry, the light wall was an absolute barrier that could never be broken.
Valentine knew this. Ryosuke knew it. Hot Pants knew it too.
"Ryosuke, what do we do?" Hot Pants asked softly. "Do we retreat?"
Retreating was indeed an option.
The power of past projections was still being transmitted endlessly.
As long as Ryosuke were given a few months, he would become strong enough to try again to hunt down Funny Valentine.
The price would be Johnny and Gyro's certain deaths.
After today, countless innocent people would also die.
According to Valentine's philosophy, happiness and misfortune ultimately cancel each other out. What he wanted was not to create happiness, but to use the power of the saint's remains to take others' happiness as gifts and bestow them upon his own country.
Behind this lay... Invasion, plunder, and oppression.
Ryosuke closed his eyes and took a deep breath.
All of that was reason enough, but more importantly, he didn't want to retreat.
Funny Valentine could face the Spin of the Cavalry without backing down, fighting for his beliefs with a will that embraced death.
Was Ryosuke really inferior to Valentine?
If he left now, then he would lose.
It sounded unreasonable, even absurd.
But on this land built of cowboys, bullets, and savagery, what was being tested was willpower itself.
"Can you still fight?" Ryosuke asked softly.
Hot Pants nodded heavily.
"Of course."
The ability of Scary Monsters activated again, and Hot Pants transformed back into a pink dinosaur.
She had lost an arm, her tail was gone, and there was a huge wound in her chest, but her teeth were still sharp, and her legs had already adapted to the soft ground.
Ryosuke flipped onto her back. In his hand, a steel ball slowly began to rotate.
He stared at Funny Valentine, lowered his body slightly, clamped his legs around Hot Pants, and charged like a medieval knight.
The distance between them kept shrinking.
Until a certain moment, Hot Pants's body perfectly matched the Golden Rectangle. A force traveled along her spine, through Ryosuke's muscles and arms, and into the steel ball in his palm.
Fire!
The steel ball struck the light wall, stirring only a slight ripple, and in the end… it still couldn't enter.
'Still not enough!'
After seeing three people use the Spin of the Cavalry in succession, Funny Valentine had figured out the key.
A mount.
To use that bizarre spin, one had to rely on the power of a mount.
Otherwise, even setting Johnny and Gyro aside, there was no way to explain why Ryosuke, with his superior physical strength, would ride Hot Pants and greatly sacrifice his own agility.
In other words...
"As long as I kill your mount, Ryosuke, you'll lose your last threatening method!"
D4C ignored the overly agile Ryosuke and swung a palm down toward Hot Pants.
Blood splattered.
Yet Hot Pants felt no pain.
At the last moment, Ryosuke had blocked the blow with his own shoulder.
"Ryosuke!" Hot Pants cried out in shock.
She truly hadn't expected Ryosuke to willingly take the hit to save her.
Then came two more splashes.
Gyro and Johnny returned from the parallel world. Johnny had a deep gunshot wound in his abdomen. Gyro, though uninjured, no longer had any steel balls in his hands.
Supporting Johnny, Gyro stood more than ten meters away and witnessed the first exchange between Ryosuke and Funny Valentine.
At this moment, Gyro saw the true reason Ryosuke couldn't use the Spin of the Cavalry and shouted loudly, "The shortest path is taking a detour. Taking a detour is my shortest path."
After shouting, afraid Ryosuke wouldn't understand, he hurriedly added, "Don't think about control, don't think about efficiency. Let the power transmitted by the mount run on its own!"
Run… on its own?
Ryosuke had Ripple energy, natural power. The force transmitted from Hot Pants naturally couldn't be allowed to run wild inside his body, it had to be guided into the steel ball.
What if it crashed into the Ripple or natural power?
It was like someone throwing him a straw. Ryosuke instinctively caught it and stuck it into a milk tea cup.
Gyro's idea, on the other hand, was that there was no need to catch it, the straw would insert itself into the cup, and then the milk tea would run into Ryosuke's mouth by itself. Absurd.
Seeing Ryosuke completely confused, Gyro wanted to explain more.
But there was no time.
Funny Valentine attacked again.
Ryosuke's body couldn't withstand another blow from D4C.
Even though he'd always mocked it as the shame of double-A strength and speed, with a human body, one more hit would really kill him.
There was only one chance.
Kill Valentine, or be killed by him.
At this moment, the blazing sun hung overhead. It was exactly noon, sunlight pouring down through the narrow crack in the ocean.
Noon had arrived.
Hot Pants moved forward.
The fierce wind lifted the blood from Ryosuke's shoulder wound, trailing behind him like a crimson cape.
He dispersed the Ripple within his body, releasing his own dinosaur transformation, and with the most ordinary mortal body, launched the final charge.
The distance closed.
Five meters… three meters… one meter.
Hot Pants reached the Golden Rectangle.
But at that moment, Funny Valentine reached into the seawater wall. The upper and lower seawater "clamped" his hand, and one of his hands slipped into a parallel world.
When it reappeared, his hand was gripping the neck of Hot Pants from a parallel world, which he hurled toward the dinosaur Hot Pants.
In one world, aside from Valentine who possessed D4C, any collision between two identical individuals would result in annihilation, both ultimately disappearing.
As the two Hot Pants collided, the dinosaur Hett's Golden Rectangle was destroyed.
Funny Valentine roared, "Ryosuke, your time to die has come! Everything is over!"
"No!"
Hot Pants endured the pain of annihilation.
"It's not over yet."
She planted her feet on the ground and exerted force, flinging Ryosuke high into the air. At the instant of the throw, the bodies of the two Hot Pants overlapped, forming an even larger Golden Rectangle.
"Charge!"
"Ryosuke!"
"Charge!"
Soaring through the air, Ryosuke felt the power coming from her, and also the will carried along with it.
At this moment, he finally understood.
Between two points, what is the shortest distance?
Many people blurt out, 'Of course, a straight line.'
But reality isn't so simple.
Because there is "gravity."
When a small ball moves from point A at a higher position to point B, which is slightly lower and has some horizontal distance, under the influence of gravity, the fastest path from A to B is actually a curve.
In the real world, the forces affecting an object's movement aren't limited to gravity, there are many more.
Based on this, physicists, after generations of research, summarized an entire discipline, Analytical mechanics.
What Ryosuke had been doing before, guiding the force, was merely drawing a crude "straight line."
Now, he dispersed all Ripple, natural power, and dinosaur form, allowing the force to move freely through his body.
Guided by the Golden Rectangle, this force traveled through him in the most elegant form calculated by analytical mechanics, along a faster and more powerful trajectory, until finally... it flowed into the steel ball.
Into the Spin based on the Golden Rectangle, Ryosuke added this uncontrollable force, like introducing a variable "X" into mathematics, achieving a true leap in power.
The two combined, intertwining at just the right balance, perfectly meshing.
Like a spiraling, ascending DNA helix.
This was Lesson 5: Spin of the Cavalry.
Leaping through the air, Ryosuke raised his right hand high, the spinning steel ball held in his palm.
The steel ball overlapped with the sun. The world seemed to dim, but then an even more dazzling light burst forth from the steel ball.
Gyro remembered.
Why, when he first saw Ryosuke, he had felt such familiarity, such reliability.
Because when he looked into Ryosuke's eyes, he felt something similar to when he touched the saint's remains.
And now, Ryosuke's gaze fell upon Funny Valentine.
He didn't throw the steel ball.
Ryosuke didn't want even the slightest mistake, nor did he want to give Valentine any chance to dodge.
He slammed the spinning steel ball in his palm directly against the light wall.
Bzzzz!
A piercing rotational hum rang out.
The invincible light wall rippled.
Under Funny Valentine's horrified gaze, Ryosuke's hands pierced into the light wall, tearing it open inch by inch with his bare hands.
The steel ball flew in and struck Funny Valentine in the chest.
But it wasn't over.
Ryosuke stepped forward into the light wall, clenched his fists, and the dispersed Ripple, natural power, and dinosaur transformation returned all at once.
And then...
"Muda muda muda muda muda!"
"Muda muda muda muda muda!"
"Muda muda muda muda muda!"
Countless punches rained down on Funny Valentine. Combined with the rotational force, his body erupted with massive sprays of blood, until the final punch,
Funny Valentine was sent flying.
Lucy drifted down gently and fell into Ryosuke's arms.
The moment he touched Lucy, the world froze. And yet gentle voice appeared behind Ryosuke, "Hello."